Where I write about running, marathons, Home Ownership, DIY projects, marriage, raising twins, growing up Polish and other Mysteries of Life

Saturday, November 25, 2017

Winter Training Memories

I was thinking of someone I use to run with back in the day. We were group leaders for Winter Training. One winter I was going out for a 20 mile run and looking for some people to run me in. I

was training for one the many spring marathons I've run as such, was doing the bulk of my training solo.

SF volunteered but she only wanted to do 5 miles. On the surface that sounds like a great thing. SF is gonna help me with 25% of my run.

Couple of things here..

First, most marathoners do their LRs by going out and back. If you are running 12, you go six miles in on direction and then come back. This is a little game we play with ourselves so that we finish without quitting or cutting our run short. [unless injured, inclement weather or just having a really craptastic run.]

Second, anyone who has ever trained for a marathon and has run 20 miles knows that the first 5 miles is the "easy" part. Heck, if you are a marathoner and have run multiple marathons, I'd say the first 10 miles usually isn't so bad. It's the second half where the struggle is real.

Third, when someone asks you to Run Them In, it's just understood they are referring to meeting up with them closer to the end of the run so that they don't give up.

But SF didn't want to wait 2 hours or come back, SF was already there. And SF didn't want to run 5 miles with me and then turn around. SF wanted to only do 5 miles total, which meant 2.5 out and 2.5 back which doesn't really help me at all.

What SF should have done was done some fuzzy math and figured that if I left at X time and ran an 8 minute pace, I'd be turning around at 1:20 minutes, give or take and meet me five miles from our base two hours after my start time. But that is a lot of work and not fun. She didn't want to flesh it out over email the days before, saying we'll figure it out on Saturday but when Saturday came she didn't want to stand around in the cold trying to figure it out.

What I should have done was said okay let's go 2.5 miles north, turn around and then head back to base and I'll run 15 south on my own. But I wasn't thinking of making the best of what a flake had to offer, I was trying to figure out how to get what I wanted.